An (Un)kindness of Men
Your home was similar to mine in many ways. Two bedrooms, two and a half baths. The ceilings were low, with the lights broken in the wake of a half-baked renovation.
However, your home was different from mine in a key way, your home housed a family. A complete unit. One that contained a mother, a father and a daughter.
Although your home knew pain; miscarriage, unemployment and ill-timed death were frequent visitors that memorised the crevices of your walls, your home housed a rich laughter.
Your arms were the first to teach me what meant to be loved by a man. A father figure. You lifted me into brighter days even as I became too heavy for you to carry. You were my lighthouse, through trying and turbulent times. Your home provided me with a safe house, against the war of my growing teenage angst. My back hardened at the hands of my mother. Her assaults were wild and untamed. My soul softened in your presence. Your purple aura of compassion coupled with pounded yam and all things fried, made me forget my desire to hunt for a better life.
Your wife became my mother. She raised me to see the world with kindness and joy, the kind that gave Hallmark a run for its money. Your daughter, my companion. A private members’ club where we shared our pre-adolescent secrets of boys, TV shows and which one of us was more likely to marry Trey Songz. We were inseparable until a cool autumn day in my twelfth year when you robbed me of my first kiss.
I wished you had stopped there, but your hands were on an animalistic journey, a route that could not be derailed. Your eyes widened with curiosity as your nasal tip explored my newly developed pubic hair. I laid there paralysed, consuming the knowledge that this was what it meant to be loved. These are dues to be paid to secure a family, a father, a home.
You were the first of many unkind men. You disguise yourself as a loving father, devoted husband. Child molester. Within your arms, I learnt what it meant to have a family. Within your home, I learnt joy and developed an affliction of what it meant to be loved. Your façade was so fitting I often questioned why I didn’t scream. Had I wanted you to purloin my youth?
In the astronomical twilight, as I struggle to sleep, my mind wanders to the day you made me a victim. The frenzy your tongue played with my nipples and how you groaned with satisfaction as their biological response was to harden. The moistness of your breath against my cheek savoured every moment of me until your daughter interrupted your assault. I ponder how your incomplete mission defined the men I sought and the love I accepted.
Yet for every memory I have of us, our family, the events that tainted my view of the world, I am blessed with a kaleidoscope of encounters with men who have elevated me.
I give thanks to the man who taught me to meditate after an attempt at my life. I pay a levy to the man who drove 412 miles to engulf me in his arms after the passing of yet another friend. I bow to the man who stripped me of my bloodied clothes and washed my menstruation stained underwear with his bare hands. I give tribute to the man that taught me I was a survivor. All of them aiding in clearing the rubble of your decade-old airstrike.
Men mirror an unkindness of ravens. Circling the sky in search of their next prey, debating whether to love or destroy.
